Our emotions have run the gamut from the inebriated
elation following a big win which induced us to pound
out a chorus of celebration on the top of an occupied
Reno police car to the frustrated depths of biting
a hole through a card after picking up what seemed
our 23rd consecutive stiff hand against the dealer's
ten up card. i've stared at the ceiling in the mockingly
misnamed Victory Motel, wondering how in the name
of Probability we could be good enough to win $400
in six hours of steady play downtown and bad enough
to then lose $100 in each of nine Las Vegas Strip
casinos in only three and a half hours that evening.

Our playing career has had a sort of a Faustian aspect
to it, as we began to explore the mysteries of the
game we began to lose, and the deeper we delved, the
more we lost. There was even a time when we wondered
if Messrs. Thorp, Wilson, Braun, and Epstein had,
themselves, entered into a pact with the casinos to
deliberately exaggerate the player's odds in the game.
But after renewing my faith by confirming their figures
for the basic game, we threw ourself once again into
the fray, alas with the same results.

You
might have thought I disparaged the loose-aggressive
style, but compared to the loose-passive style, the
loose-aggressive style is championship level poker.

Loose-passive
is easily the worst of the four approaches, leading
to poor results unless you have both good cards and
bad opponents. Even then, the loose-passive style
wins less than it should. With great cards, loose-passive
will probably do better than tight passive and possibly
even better than tight-aggressive simply because the
loose-passive player gets involved in a lot of pots.
Logically, if you're involved in a lot of pots with
great cards, it's practically impossible not to win
a lot.